273071 - Mailto links are controlled by GNOME prefs, even in KDE

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect)

Description

[Richard Neill]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040514
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041127 Firefox/1.0

Clicking on a mailto: link ought to open my default mail client under KDE. 

It doesn't. Fortunately, I guessed that the answer is to open the
gnome-control-center from the command line, even though I don't use gnome.

A newbie could never fix this, especially since Mandrake hide GNOME-specific
items from the KDE menu.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.



Expected Results:  
It should detect that I'm running KDE and use KDE's mailto handler. 

Also, firefox should have a preference setting to control this (even if the
preference setting simply says "this uses the system-wide config in
gnome-control center")

Ideally, I'd like a config option to choose between:

Applications: Thunderbird, 
              Mozilla Mail
              Evolution
              Kmail

GUI defaults: GNOME
              KDE

Command line  [ /usr/local/bin/mymailclient %s ]

In this case, firefox makes 2 mistakes.

  * It doesn't follow the principle of least surprise.

  * The control isn't in the obvious place (Edit->Preferences)

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

we really need a place for gathering KDE integration bugs that no one will ever
fix.  That isn't meant to be harsh, but the people and companies working on
Linux bits are all GNOME-oriented, and no one seems interested in a KDE port for
Firefox.

Comment 2

[Richard Neill]

KDE integration per se isn't (imho) the important thing. 
But it's a serious bug if the GNOME-ness isn't explicit, so that a user cannot
fix it.

(BTW, another GNOME thing is use of GNOME prefs for anti-aliasing. Personally, I
dislike antialiasing  - I'd much rather have decent, non-scaled fonts.)

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

ultimately, we're a GTK2-based app, so using GNOME prefs is a logical next step.
 Maybe we should add something in the release notes making this more clear, I'll
float the idea.

Comment 4

[Stefan Seifert]

Could someone explain to me why we have here a wonderful platform independent
application but restrict Linux users to one special desktop environment? Doesn't
make sense to me and I'd guess it won't for all those KDE users that will never
discover that mailto: links could actually work in Firefox. Not to speak of
those who have a slimmed down system for various reasons and simply don't need a
fat desktop environment alltogether.

Comment 5

[Jonah]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Could someone explain to me why we have here a wonderful platform independent
> application but restrict Linux users to one special desktop environment? Doesn't
> make sense to me and I'd guess it won't for all those KDE users that will never
> discover that mailto: links could actually work in Firefox. Not to speak of
> those who have a slimmed down system for various reasons and simply don't need a
> fat desktop environment alltogether.

this sucks! can we please have this fixed firefox!!

Comment 6

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

To reiterate what I've said, in many places, at many times, for better or worse
we're on the GTK2/GNOME integration train.  We're not that platform independent,
we pick up GTK themes, and GTK button ordering, among other things.

To respect KDE prefs, we'd need an integration layer with KDE, and we'd want to
use KDE dialogs, and KDE theming, etc.  There's a port for QT, it was back on
track at one point, but I'm not sure where that's going.  Once its
production-ready, a Firefox KDE port is feasible, but until then we're basically
a GNOME/GTK2 app, like it or lump it.

Comment 7

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs,
filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 8

[Richard Neill]

There is an easy workaround: add this to about:config.
  network.protocol-handler.app.mailto =  /usr/bin/thunderbird  
However, there really ought to be a GUI for this. 

This bug is most definitely valid, and it is ludicrous that, by default, Firefox doesn't pair with thunderbird!

Comment 11

[Ladislav Nesnera]

(In reply to comment #8)
> There is an easy workaround: add this to about:config.
>   network.protocol-handler.app.mailto =  /usr/bin/thunderbird  
> However, there really ought to be a GUI for this. 
> 
> This bug is most definitely valid, and it is ludicrous that, by default,
> Firefox doesn't pair with thunderbird!
> 

This technique works for me in FF 2.x. I'm use FF 3 rc1 with the same setting for network.protocol-handler.app.mailto and it doesn't work :(  (I have Kmail)